Our Vision

Since 2019, the BCDSS has developed and applied its innovative concept of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies (SADs) to a wide range of case studies across time periods and world regions. Our research explores both well-known forms of dependency — such as Roman, transatlantic, or Mamluk slavery, convict labor, and debt bondage — as well as more concealed forms like human trafficking and domestic servitude.

The concept of SADs allows for a comprehensive analytical framework to understand how power imbalances have historically shaped, and continue to influence, societies around the world. In the context of present-day global challenges — such as forced migration, socioeconomic inequality, and environmental exploitation — this research offers critical insights into the enduring legacies of dependency.

Funding for Phase 2 Granted
© BCDSS

During Phase 2 (2026–2032), the BCDSS will investigate the underlying causes and mechanisms that contribute to the persistence of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies (SADs) across historical and contemporary contexts. We aim to further anchor Historically Informed Dependency Studies as a key interdisciplinary field in the humanities, encouraging scholars across the humanities and social sciences to systematically integrate the analysis of SADs into the study of social, economic, and cultural phenomena.

Research Program

The BCDSS strives for productive and creative collaborations. Our research operates with low hierarchies, granting researchers maximum autonomy. We facilitate collaboration and invite researchers to leave their disciplinary comfort zones and explore new ideas and methods. 

In order to foster joint activities, we will implement new formats of exchange that will enhance creative interaction across disciplines, for all status groups, and for scholars from different academic cultures. 

For this reason, we designed three Platforms of Collaboration for Phase 2:

  • Research Areas
  • Spaces of Synergy
  • Methods Lab

These three platforms also generate collaboration with our international fellows and act as catalysts for multi- and interdisciplinary international collaboration. 

Platforms of Collaboration
© BCDSS

Research Areas (RAs)

Our RAs are the bedrock structure of our research and serve as interfaces between disciplines. They provide a relatively long-term, easily accessible, and stable research community space of exchange and cooperation for individual researchers. 

To ensure that ideas and discourses will flourish not only within, but also across RAs, every PI, Postdoc, and PhD will join at least one of our five new RAs: 

  • Transitions and Transformations
  • Economies of SAD
  • Power – Violence – Trauma
  • Cultural Heritage – Transitional Justice – Memory Cultures
  • Alternative Archives and Life Writing

The members of the RAs will meet regularly in collaborative work formats and generate the core outputs of our research.  

Spaces of Synergy (SoS)

This platform enables collaborations across RAs of various kinds. The aim of these SoS is to provide a dynamic and open collaborative space for bottom-up initiatives and productive activities such as working and reading groups, joint conferences, and special issues.

For example, this is the space where we can work together to design our three overarching conferences, which will take place in 2026, 2029, and 2032.

Methods Lab

Establishing the field of Historically Informed Dependency Studies in an interdisciplinary fashion requires innovation on the methodological level. We thus conceive of our new Methods Lab as an open, experimental, and exploratory communication platform for all members of the BCDSS, serving as a stimulus for innovation.

The methods include practical investigative procedures adopted across the more than 30 disciplines.

Furthermore, we want to encourage and enable researchers across disciplines to employ new methods subsumed under digital humanities. In doing so, they will receive support by the Bonn Center for Digital Humanities (BCDH).

Research Areas (RAs)

Eine Wissenschaftlerin und ein Wissenschaftler arbeiten hinter einer Glasfassade und mischen Chemikalien mit Großgeräten.
© BCDSS

At the end of Phase 1, we identified five key common insights which pave the way for future research into Phase 2.

These insights are the foundations of our five new RAs and will enable us to fully understand why and how SADs persist globally and over time. 

RA A: Transitions and Transformations

RA A uses one of the major research findings from Phase 1 as its premise: while SADs are constitutive of all human societites, their forms are neither stable in themselves nor do they play out in static environments. Instead, SADs are shaped by continuities and changes at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of societies. The study of transitions is also closely related to the theory of path dependence, which postulates that current social forms at any given time are dependent on social conditions, institutional patterns, and individual choices in the past (Mahoney 2000). Research in this RA will contribute to meeting one of our research objectives for Phase 2, i.e., developing a concept of relational SAD and examining more systematically how different SADs not only interrelate but also co-determine each other. 

Mahoney, J. 2000. "Path-Dependence in Historical Sociology," Theory and Society 29: 507–48.

RA B: Economies of SADs

RA B will examine how the partial or complete exclusion, by coercive means, from access to markets, resources, honor, and social relations shape economic behavior. Economists have long focused on the utility of inclusion into markets, anthropologists on inclusion into communities, while economic anthropologists insist that there are locally contextualized modes of inclusion into markets – such as ethical values, and institutions or extra-market modes of production and distribution – that frame economic behavior including subsistence or barter (Hann 2018). However, violence and social inequalities remain understudied under these approaches even though a paradigmatic shift in this area of research has been in the making ever since Eric Williams' pioneering study (1944) of the formative role of slavery in emerging capitalism. Research in this RA will build on this approach and contribute to meeting another research objective of Phase 2, i.e., examining how and why logics of efficiency and the increase of capital (economic, social, and moral) inform SADs and how they are embedded in the wider cultural context and belief system. 

Hann, C. 2018. "Moral(Ity and) Economy: Work, Workfare, and Fairness in Provincial Hungary," Archives européennes de sociologie. European Journal of Sociology 59, no. 2: 225–54.
Williams, E. 1944. Slavery and Capitalism, University of North Carolina Press. 

RA C: Power – Violence – Trauma

RA C builds on another major insight from Phase 1: physical coercion and emotional violence are key interconnected factors for establishing and upholding systems and relations of SAD. These systems and relations often entail enforced separation, and as such bring about the loss of cultural and social belonging within and across families and kin. They may also weaken society as a whole and lead to social change. Physical and emotional violence signify, in one way or another, systems of SAD as they occur across historical periods and cultural contexts (Ismard, Rossi, Vidal 2022). Research in this RA will focus on our third research objective of Phase 2, i.e., investigating the interrelated power dynamics in situations of, and communities structured through, SAD. The capacity to exercise physical and emotional violence on a daily basis, to threaten and to dominate discursive strategies in a given society, and the techniques employed for upholding power relations and their links to symbolic and religious order form the vantage point of this RA. 

Ismard, P., C. Vidal, B. Rossi, eds. 2022. Les Mondes de L'Esclavage, Seuil.  

RA D: Cultural Heritage – Transitional Justice – Memory Cultures

RA D will focus on the interrelated and contested fields of cultural heritage, memory, and justice. The notion of cultural heritage is situated at the interface of competing concepts and traditions associated with national, regional, communal, and religious identities and senses of belonging (Higgins, Douglas 2021; Silverman, 2011; Osireditse Keitumetse 2016). Moreover, cultural heritage is inextricably linked with cultural memory and concepts of (in)justice, e.g., discussing contemporary notions of justice and considering how these notions address histories of colonial dispossession, enslavement, and other forms of SAD from the perspective of those who were colonized, enslaved, and dependent. Research in this RA will meet our fourth research objective of Phase 2, i.e., contributing to current public debates regarding these important social and political questions, benefiting from a dynamic research environment made up of several university and non-university institutions that share a strong interest in cultural heritage. 

Higgins, V. and D. Douglas, eds. 2021. Communities and Cultural Heritage: Global Issues, Local Values, Routledge.
Osireditse Keitumetse, S. 2016. African Cultural Heritage Conservation and Management: Theory and Practice from Southern Africa, Springer.
Silverman, H., ed. 2011. Contested Cultural Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure and Exclusion in a Global World, Springer. 

RA E: Alternative Archives – Life Writing

RA E will bring together researchers from different disciplines with a shared interest in exploring the words, actions, and archival traces of enslaved and dependent people and the question of which narratives of SAD and slavery emerge once lives of dependent people are put center stage. Not only were people living in social relations of SAD often prevented from learning how to read and write, but also archives of slavery and SAD usually privilege records of enslavers and of those in power. Attentive to how colonial and imperial epistemologies still determine Western (post-Enlightenment) narratives of freedom and progress, this RA aims to methodologically inquire into archives, their sources and uses, and the kinds of historical, visual, and literary narratives they produce, and seeks to identify and explore alternative sources on the lives silenced by these processes. Thus, research in this RA will be informed by our fifth research objective of Phase 2, i.e., developing innovative, creative, and imaginative methods to find, listen to, and restore the agency and the voices and experiences of people who bent to, were forced into, resisted, survived, and endured a life in SAD. 

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